Roughly one month into his unexpected, some might say surprise, war in Iran, President Trump has finally decided, finally deemed it necessary, to go before the American people and explain just why we’re doing this, and explain that it’s actually going quite well, that we have war aims, that we’re definitely meeting them, that a war has never gone better than this one, and that the United States is on its way to triumph. “Thank you very much.” Don’t worry about the high gas prices. Don’t worry about the United States‘s being unable to secure control of the Strait of Hormuz. Ignore that our European allies are unwilling to bend to our pressure. Don’t pay attention to the fact that far from bringing stability to the region, this conflict seems to be widening, broadening and producing more chaos than there was before. No, the president is saying, ignore all of that and believe me, believe me that everything is going well. “We are on track to complete all of America’s military objectives shortly, very shortly.” Of course we know that it’s not going well. The fact that the president felt compelled to give this kind of address is a sign that it’s not going too well. There’s an element of him protesting too much, and all of this. And although the president in his address said that we have accomplished regime change of some sort, that’s simply not the case. Nor is it the case that we’ve replaced one leader with a more pliable or moderate leader. That is 100 percent not true. What we’ve done instead is empowered some of the hardest-line elements of the regime. The president says to the American people, don’t worry about the prospect of not getting access to oil through the Strait of Hormuz. The United States produces lots of oil and energy. You can buy it from us. “And in any event, when this conflict is over, the strait will open up naturally. It’ll just open up naturally. They’re going to want to be able to sell oil because that’s all they have.” But we know, we can see with our own eyes, that this war has, first, empowered Iran to take complete control of the Strait of Hormuz, and created essentially a choke point in the global economy that it now controls. If nothing else happened in this conflict, that would represent a profound strategic defeat for the United States. But add to that the fact this conflict has sparked a mounting global energy crisis that is certain to slow down the global economy and hit Americans in their pocketbooks. Far from being a glorious military operation, so far, the actual impact of this for the United States is a strategic defeat and a weaker economy at home. The truth of the matter, and ignoring the president’s claims, Iran wasn’t on the verge of creating a nuclear weapon. There wasn’t an imminent threat. We weren’t looking at the annihilation of large parts of the Middle East. which is what Trump suggested. No, this was a war of choice, almost a war of boredom, a war from a president who was facing mounting criticism at home and thought that he could alleviate some of his political discontent by starting a conflict under the delusion that it would unfold the way that the conflict he started with Venezuela. He thought it would be like that, but it isn’t. For all the destruction he has been able to cause with American military might, he hasn’t actually accomplished anything. All he’s done is thrashed around, creating needless chaos and killing a lot of people. That’s not just American service members who have died in this conflict, that’s Iranian civilians. That’s the scores of girls killed in our initial bombing. There is the recent report of additional civilian deaths from the same day. And I think it was noteworthy, I think it’s so noteworthy, that the president has nothing to say about that. Nothing to say about the civilians we have killed. They don’t really exist to him. It’s not even clear that the economic pain Americans feel exists to him. He just hand waves it away, insisting that everything is good, insisting that through the power of positive thinking, he can turn what is a mess into something worthwhile. Into something that will make the public like him again. But no. That’s not going to happen. He has started a war that he can’t win. He doesn’t know what to do about it. And now the rest of us are very much stuck with it.
